Tag Archives: amazon-cloud-player

Google’s Music Beta allows you to place your music collection in the cloud, quite similar to what Amazon’s Cloud Player and Apple’s iCloud do. The tech giants appear to be ready to get into a head-to-head battle with each other, with your tunes up for grabs. As of right now, Google’s Music Beta is free to use. How does it compare to the other offerings, though?

You can download free tracks when you receive your invitation to the Music beta. As soon as it was announced, I signed up for my invite. I received it in fairly quick fashion. The email told me to click to accept, and had me download the program for my operating system. I was then easily able to sync my music into the Cloud with just a click or two.

I don’t use iTunes to manage my music, so this was something I wanted to try out. I have to give Google props for allowing me to turn this into a preference pane. I love the way it’s laid out, how it looks and works on my desktop and the various preferences I can tweak to make it work the way that is best for me.

I’m not the kind of person who really buys digital albums. If I purchase one, it’s a physical disc. I prefer to subscribe to music services, such as Rhapsody. I am able to listen to a large variety this way at any point in time. However, Google’s Music Beta is a great solution for managing and listening to the music I DO happen to own.

I had to run Music in Safari because it doesn’t run well within the development version of Chrome. That’s a pretty big oopsie, but I’m sure that they will address this in a future update… at least, I hope so.

I can browse through my Music folders and find what I want with ease. I can sort via album, genre and artist. The service even lets me give a thumbs up or down to every tune in my library. I’m not sure why you’d choose to own or upload a song you’d want to thumbs down… but that’s a story for another day.

Are you interested in using any of the Cloud-based music services? Which one do you prefer?